I picked up a new road bike. I hadn’t planned on it, but my cheap converted mountain bike to road bike required upwards of $250 in repairs, which is how much I paid for it $300+ in repairs and a thousand miles ago. Also, I will be doing a century bike race in April, that’s 100 miles, and figured it was time for an upgrade. I got a very good deal on last year’s model of the Giant Defy 2. It has decent hardware and carbon seat and forks. The difference between this bike and my old bike is night and day.

I put in over 60 miles this week. Here are some photos from my week of biking.

 

Tara and I had planned to have Christmas dinner with my oldest friend, Henry Kikunaga. We’ve been good friends since kindergarten in Morgan Hill, CA.  Over the years he and I have lived all over the states, but never near one another until recently when we some how managed to end up only 8 miles away. He is in Chula Vista and I am in downtown San Diego. Of course, we rarely see one another. He works as hard as I do and he recently had triplets. Yes, triplets.

Alas, our Christmas dinner plans were dashed because my kids were sick and we couldn’t expose the triplets. We did have a wonderful time nonetheless. We visited Mission Bay Park and then later, since we hadn’t planned for Christmas dinner, we ordered dinner from Celadon Thai. It was great, we had duck. It reminded me of “A Christmas Story”.

 

 

The day after Christmas we took the kids to the Zoo. I hope my kids will realize how lucky they are to have Seaworld, the San Diego Zoo and countless parks and beaches within a couple miles from our house.

I love San Diego. It is an idyllic place to raise kids.

Rion was pretending to pose for a school photo at the MindTouch Christmas party. Mark’s comment at Flickr is priceless, but it took me Googling the reference to realize the hilarity of it.

How the hell does Mark know Rascal Flats?

If you know me, you already know I’m a huge Amazon.com fan. I love the service, but here are four reasons other than it being the best online store evAR.

Reason number one. Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder:

Jeff is awesome. Cheerful, smart, down-to-earth, funny. He is just an awesome guy.

Reason number two. I love my Kindle. It’s magical. Thanks again for the awesome birthday present Steve.

Reason number three.

Right, that is Werner Vogel, the CTO of Amazon, fielding support on Twitter. By the way, Werner is another guy who is a brilliant person and also very cheerful and friendly.

Reason number four. Finally, I love Amazon.com because a few of their lovely and wise executives have referred business to MindTouch. Including some big customers like The Washington Post.

Thanks for being kick ass Amazon.com.

You mean it’s not?

I stole an ass hat during the MindTouch white elephant party. It’s pretty awesome.

This is one of the many non-intuitive features of Facebook. If you want to link or unlink a Facebook page to a Twitter account do this:

1. Go here: http://www.facebook.com/twitter/
2. Click on the  “Link to Twitter” or "Unlink from Twitter."

How one discovers that short of scouring The Google, I don’t know.

I caught this on both MarshallK and PodcastHotel’s posterous. You whacky Portlandians. Anyway, I found it amusing and oddly resonant.